Mission Issues Are Wide, Conference Participants Find
Episcopal News Service. July 28, 1983 [83143]
The Rev. H. Boone Porter, The Living Church
HONOLULU (DPS, July 28) -- Greetings in a wide range of languages, lei garlands, and many animated conversations characterized the growing crowd as the Pacific Basin Conference assembled at Hawaii Loa College on June 19. Bishops and other clergy and lay people, young and old, came together for the unprecedented meeting of delegates from 51 dioceses of the Anglican Communion in or around the Pacific Ocean, and other guests and resource persons. More than 150 people attended.
The purpose of the conference was the examination of the past and present church missionary policies in light of the teaching of Roland Allen, an Anglican missionary theologian, and possible future application of his views in the renewal and revitalization of the missionary expansion of the church.
The successive days of the conference followed a schedule of Morning Prayer, breakfast and then a reflective talk on Christian leadership by Dr. Kosuke Koyama, a native of Japan and a minister of the United Church of Christ, who spent many years as a missionary in Thailand. He is now professor of ecumenics and world Christianity at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
On the first morning, the Rev. David M. Paton, canon of Canterbury Cathedral, author, former missionary, and recognized expert on Roland Allen, gave a summary of Allen's life and teaching, not disguising the controversial quality of the topic. He stressed that although Allen's ideas were unconventional, he was basically a conservative, austere, old-fashioned High Anglican, following the path of the Tractarians and the seventeenth-Century High Churchman such as Jeremy Taylor.
The proceedings were summarized daily at noon by New Zealand Paul Reeves. He emphasized often the relation of the conference to the circumstances of the Pacific world. The New Zealand Primate, himself of Maori descent, has been a leader in ordaining self-supporting priests, chosen by their own local communities, to serve Maori villages.
The conference took a somewhat different turn on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings when it was addressed first by the Rev. Jaci C. Maraschin of Brazil and the next day by Dr. Matthew Solato of the Fiji Islands. Both spoke from perspectives quite different from those of most of the North Americans.
Although Brazil is not part of the Pacific Basin, its dioceses, and others in Latin America, were invited to send delegates because of the usefulness the conference might have for them. Maraschin is a priest of the Egreja Episcopal do Brasil (the Brazilian Anglican Church) and professor in the postgraduate ecumenical school of sciences of religion at the Federacao de Escolas Superiores in Sao Paolo.
Considering the concept of the indigenous church, he asserted that it can only be achieved when a church is reborn within a particular nation and culture. He described the liberation theology of Latin America as emerging in this way. "The transported church, the translated church" brought in by missionaries is somewhat outside local life and aloof from political and controversial questions. Its bishops are content to make "vague and general statements about justice, peace, and love." The indigenous church, on the other hand, identifies with the suffering people of the country and enters into their conflicts and politics.
The economic and social scenario of the Pacific world, with special attention to the small islands of Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, was presented by Solata. A Fijan physician and a lay canon of the cathedral in Suva, he has for many years served the people of Polynesia as a diplomat and international spokesman.
Solata described the rapid rise of population in the small island nations, growing unemployment, the migration of people to the cities, the increase of juvenile delinquency and other social and health problems, the decline of subsistence farming, and the growing indebtedness of these impoverished nations as they import food from wealthier countries. Where industries or commercialized farming have been introduced, the profits appear to have gone largely to owners in Taiwan, Japan, North America, or elsewhere. For cultures traditionally rooted in the land, movement away from the land has been profoundly disruptive to individuals and to communities. The involvement of the church is highly important in these circumstances in which, even if the economy is improved, so many other problems will remain. Subsequent discussion made it evident that the land issue, and the involvement of the church in it, was of grave concern to many at the conference.
The explosive nature of land questions was dramatically presented on Thursday evening, as delegates from the Third World took greater leadership in the conference. Canon Hone Kas of New Zealand showed a documentary film, Bastion Point "507". On a small piece of contested hereditary land near Auckland, Maori people stood on guard for over a year, refusing to be evacuated. On the 507th day, hundreds of New Zealand police arrived and forcibly removed the non-violent protesters and bulldozed their houses. Many in the audience expressed shock.
Maori churchmen voiced their special indignation that the Province of New Zealand and other Anglican Church could so strongly condemn apartheid in South Africa, while failing to give effective opposition to the injustices of racism in their own nation. It was charged that topic of land rights had been soft-pedaled in the agenda of the forthcoming World Council of Churches meeting in Vancouver because of the fear of Canadians that too many questions would be asked regarding Canadian Indian lands.
Meanwhile, workshop groups described and discussed dozens of case histories in the home area of the different delegations. There were many acknowledgements of frustration and discouragement such as, "Most clergy training and inclination is oriented toward maintaining parish structure and not mission." Hopes and plans also emerged. We hope to send missionaries overseas...and serve in Bangladesh in near future (a Japanese diocese).
As the conference moved into its final stages, a summing up was undertaken by two specialists in adult education, Patricia N. Page and the Rt. Rev. George C. Harris. Page, who served for many years as a missionary in Zambia and later on the staff of the National Institute for Lay Training in New York, has, since 1980, been on the faculty of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif.
Harris, Bishop of Alaska, former director of the Dakota Leadership Program in South Dakota, had been a missionary for many years in the Philippines. He described in detail the wide divergence between the teaching of the church about ordained and lay ministry and the actual practice. Concerning the priesthood he said, "the majority of parishes are still served by a single overworked priest who, in the absence of a remote and inaccessible bishop, a dearth of fellow-priests, a non-existent diaconate, and a passive laity, attempts to carry alone the entire ministerial function of the congregation."
In contrast, "It is only within a framework of a renewed and diversified ministry consisting of an accessible bishop, fellow-presbyters, a restored diaconate and a trained and active body of laity who have been 'equipped for ministry', that the priesthood can be restored to its function and relationship to the church."
In regard to lay leadership and the ordaining of priests and deacons who have not been to theological school, a frequently raised question is that of education. In the developing nations, a further dimension to the question is how to impart sufficient education to leaders without taking them out of their own culture and their home communities. Too often the past education has meant that the leader is never again part of his people.
An answer to this problem is offered by Theological Education by Extension, a disciplined system of adult education which was first formulated in Central America in the 1960s and has since spread widely in the Third World. Dr. F. Ross Kinsler, a former missionary educator and one of the founders of the movement, addressed the conference Thursday morning. A specialist in New Testament studies, Kinsler is shortly to assume duties as director of the Southern California Extension Center of San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Kinsler sees the system as a tool which helps to fulfill Allen's vision of a church in which Christians at the local level can assume church leadership responsibilities and choose suitable candidates for ordination. The training for ministry program of the School of Theology of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn., was pointed out as an outstanding program of the system as it relates to the Episcopal Church.